Cisco webex and spark sign up

Overview: In late 2017 the business leadership team prioritized an effort to expand the user base. Webex extended their service offering and was excited to get traction on a new chat tool. However, the business was not getting the traction they expected since the new tool was launched, in fact account activations and daily usage of the new tool was stagnate even for users who started the product free trial sign up process.

Role: My role was to partner with the business growth team and product teams to lead the redesign of the product sign up process for a free trial sign up as well as a buy flow sign up.

Challenge: The hypotheses was that one of the causes of user abandonment before activating was a cumbersome sign up process with too many account creation steps on the marketing website.

Discovering through ResearchI began the project in search of answers that would help me understand the problems our users faced. Why were users abandoning a free product sign up? Have we identified the right problem to solve? Preliminary research of competitor product sign ups and a best practice evaluation confirmed that the number of sign up steps is not always the primary reason for abandonment. This led me to believe that we should investigate the problem for other causes.

Investigating the Root Cause with ResearchI shared my initial research findings with the product owner and team to advocate for resources to conduct additional user research and learn more about the users’ friction points. We needed to know exactly WHY users were abandoning before activating their account. We needed both qualitative data to tell us why issues were happening and quantitative data to tell us what was happening.

A/B tests were conducted to understand the impacts of different approaches of content and form designs. In one of the tests we were able to validate that a landing page with a single form field performed better than a form with multiple form fields on the first step of the sign up by 4%.

I partnered with the analytics team to launch a website poll to understand the impacts of content and whether or not users were able to find the information they needed to convert. A third of the landing page visitors were not ready to sign up, while more than 40% of the visitors did not understand the offer or could not find information they needed to complete the sign up.

A/B Testing - Collabborated with the Experimentation Team to conduct split tests on the current sign up flow. The purpose was to test how the number of form fields impacted conversions from step 1 to step 2.

User Survey - Partnered with the analytics team and copywriter to create an exit poll to understand whether or not sign up webpage visitors were finding the information needed to make a sign up decision.

Designing an End to End ExperienceThe research learnings from the A/B tests and user survey gave us a clearer picture of the problem we were designing for. Now we could combine these new learnings with the best practice evaluation and competitive analysis from preliminary research.

I partnered with the content team to create a vision that leveraged the quantitative and qualitative data. We needed a new sign up model that combined a simpler design with clearer content. Our goal was to design a sign up with less barriers especially on the entry point—a landing page with condensed but clear content that highlighted features that users were searching for in an online meeting product.

After creating grayscale wireframes and flow concepts I solicited our internal teams’ designers and copywriters for peer feedback and iterated our concepts. Then I initiated design reviews with stakeholders and decision-makers to select an architecture based our design recommendation criteria.

Design Validation and Fine-tuning Before LaunchI worked with the visual designer and provided direction to begin the visual design. With the launch date approaching fast and the visual design process in progress there was a small window of opportunity to test the usability of the design. Simultaneously, I created a click through prototype to conduct gorilla-style usability testing with colleagues who were not apart of the project to get usability feedback. The testing feedback validated the direction of the sign up architecture and was an additional source for insight to fine tune the interaction and visual design. We were confident with the solution and finalized the design for launch.

Result: The redesigned the flow was launched in early 2018 and increased account activations by 26% and conversions by 16%. Improvements included clearer content, smoother navigation, better information architecture and simplified password creation.